10:26AM EDT - Hopefully this time around Tegra on RT does use the shadow core, that'd be my biggest desire from a hardware standpoint

10:24AM EDT - The event gets underway at 10:30 AM so we've got a bit of time still, which I guess we can pass with some speculation. I'd guess Tegra 4, plus possibly a S800 variant for the RT successor, and it's just a matter of which Haswell ends up inside the Pro successor at this point.

10:20AM EDT - There are some Surfaces on the podium, are any of these a Surface 2? Hard to tell from here

10:18AM EDT - WiFi is holding up, thankfully Microsoft is running some 5 GHz channels, but already down to the lowest MCS rate, Verizon LTE is holding up though, so hopefully photos will come through ok

10:17AM EDT - It's just me today on photos and text, it's going to be a busy week here in NYC

Yeah, I'm rather disappointed there isn't a Bay Trail or Kabini/Temash Surface. Great piece of hardware, but I don't want the limitations of WinRT and I don't need the price and power-draw of the Haswell version either.Reply

I think RT is the future for Windows Phone. If MS can get the WP store apps ported over, then RT would not feel so deficient. I use my Surface almost exclusively as my primary computer. It is great as a tablet, and all the things that needed to be fixed, are, for Surface 2. Desktop mode with non-touch applications on what is primarily a tablet would be frustration city. MS Store just needs the apps and then I feel there is absolutely a place for Surface 2, running what I feel is the superior touch UI of today. Once you adjust to the edge swipe-in features, it's very intuitive. It just didn't translate well on desktops.Reply

They needed Haswell to appeal to business users who has an upgrade path choice due to complete X86 compatibility (not that it is useful) but the correct mindset that is real hard to change for business types. This way at least Haswell Surface Pro has some market appeal unlike the Surface 2 using WinRT. Since RT is still crippled, it is makng the same mistakes, it did before with slightly better hardware and screen but nothing else to add. This is certainly a way to kill Surface RT in the long run. There will be millions unsold like the original Surface models. If MS were to develop a compatibility software box inside WinRT to run WP8 apps, it will help a great deal.Reply

Because everybody and his brother will soon be making Bay Trail Win 8.1 knock-offs and they didn't want to get in a low margin war with them. The Haswell is considerably faster and they come with decent SSDs and more RAM. Uses more power, but is also much higher performance and targets a different audience for use as a laptop replacement.Reply

Yup, was hoping for a move to a 3 product line-up with RT/low-end x86/high-end x86. At the end of the day they probably don't want to offer a Bay Trail SKU priced closely with the ARM version because they are still trying to drive adoption of RT. Guess I'll be getting one from Asus or another OEM. Too bad, because the build quality is nice.Reply

This might as well be the end of Win RT. Buggy OS, lousy apps in the store, ecosystem crippled by Microsoft policy, no serious hardware vendors except Microsoft -- and this event did nothing to change that.Reply

They wanted to keep this Surface on the ARM platform in order to keep that version alive. They MUST have developers create Apps for the RT version of Windows in order to stay relevant in the next 5 years and this surface will continue that push to make people adopt RT.

Yes, a Bay Trail version would have been awesome, but I'm sure you'll see 3 parties develop some nice Bay Trail Tablets to satisfy your needs.Reply